"No idea-in hindsight they're obvious enough. What's that race that flew bronze ships because they couldn't smelt iron? And every species we know that reached what the old Terrans would have called a seventeenth-century technological level did what was needed-except us. "But trying to explain contragrav and the hyperdrive skews an unsophisticated, developing physics out of shape. And those have much broader applications-the others are only really good for moving things from here to there in a hurry." With attention focused on them, too, work on other things, like electricity and atomics, never gets started. Radar, radio, computers, fission and fusion-no wonder we spent the next two hundred years conquering." With a chuckle, Chang said, "We must have seemed like angry gods when we finally got the hyperdrive and burst off Terra.
"No wonder at all," B'kila agreed soberly. "But the Confederacy grew too fast and got too big to administer, even with all the technology we had. Someone back then wrote that it was only sporting for humans to fight humans no one else gave any competition." None of our neighbors could hurt us, but we did a fine job on ourselves. But those four missing ships frighten me." "And here we are, on Loki and a few other worlds, picking over the pieces, a scrap from here, fragment from there, and one day we'll have the puzzle together again-or maybe a new shape, better than the one before. "Herbig-Haro" is a short story by Harry Turtledove, published under his pen name Eric Iverson. It was originally published in Analog, October, 1984, and reprinted in Imperial Stars I: The Stars at War, edited by Jerry Pournelle & John F. While set in the same universe as "The Road Not Taken", it has not been reprinted.Īfter the failed Roxolan invasion, Earth gained knowledge of hyperdrive and contragrav. With other technology far in advance of other species, humanity quickly expanded to other stars conquering the native populations and forming an empire called the Terran Confederacy. However, this expansion was too quick and too extensive. It became impossible to administer and so collapsed. Some 1200 years after the first contact with an alien species, a few human colonies, including Loki, had regained most of the technological knowledge of the Terran Confederacy, both by rediscovery and by scavenging ruins. The Loki Salvage Service was created to continue this work and ca. AD 3240 it encountered an alien species on the other side of the Orion Nebula which had also taken "the road less traveled".Forty, Counting Down This story is a mirror-image twin of “Twenty-one, Counting Up,” the last piece in this book. If you read the other, you’ll see something else. If you read them both, I hope they prove more than the sum of their parts.
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